Stars When You Shine
by Threepwillow
Summary: When he is alone, the wolf and the potion waging war within his blood, Remus curls into his own head and imagines ways in which it happened. :::Written for RS Games 2010. Oneshot, Remus/Sirius, weird chronology:::


A goblet of potion was left on his desk, no note with it, nothing at all. It's the first thing Remus Lupin sees when he walks into the room, the only thing he sees along with the open window. A bit early in the year yet for an open window but it's tonight. It's the night the potion arrives on his desk, noteless, curt, his clench-toothed sneer hovering like an aura around it even without him there. The potion itself is a candy-apple color and shading over darker by the second.

Remus's joints ache. Oh, in the wilder younger yesterdays, when it was like raw fire pins and needles tearing him apart every twenty-eight or so, but now it creaks and pops in a sicker nastier sort of pain, almost like arthritis (ah, but nothing like it, really). No real wolf has lived much beyond age twenty, and yet here he stands – sits, leans against his desk, is careful to not spill a drop of the rose-red potion – with _his_ struggling on, graying him from the inside out. All of him, both of him, hurts now like tree branches strained an inch from breaking. It's getting close. He should really take the potion before too much longer; but the deeper it is, the higher the moon, the better it works, and he needs it to work better than ever before, because he has seen, once, this week, a glimpse of Sirius Black on the map.

He sees the map in the room now too, on the desk, on the other side of the potion from him. Remus would take the raw fire pins and needles if it meant the return of the wilder younger yesterdays, because here and now he has had to think far too much about here-and-now's Sirius Black, the awful one, the one that is coming for Harry, the one that has him chewing his bottom lip now as he tries to look at the map and the potion and the silver-lit window all at once and ends up not being able to look anywhere, which is actually where he wanted to look in the first place, because it is always better if he tricks himself into thinking he can't see. He drops out his senses one by one, but tonight it won't fade, because the map, the _map_, and he has seen him. And he must think about him, dark hair, fierce grin, skin like moonlight (_because it transforms him_).

And Remus Lupin is expected to make that awful?

When the potion is fresh-blood dark and his elbows hurt so much to bend that he can barely manage it, he knocks back the whole goblet in one grimacing swig, before his shaking hands can spill it. It tastes like acid all the way down, and it burns his insides, and maybe there's a little of that raw fire after all.

Remus is alone, and trying not to think about him. But when he is alone, the wolf and the potion waging war within his blood, Remus curls into his own head and imagines ways in which it happened.

xxx

Remus was terribly lost. So lost, really, that he didn't have time to stop and think about how Muggle the concept was, getting lost in a shopping center. Dad had always seemed so afraid that it would happen to him. Mum was more afraid of...well, of things like what had actually happened. But Remus couldn't even be upset about being lost, because he was lost in Madam Malkin's, in Diagon Alley, which meant that he was buying school robes, which meant he could stop thinking about Muggle things altogether for a while, because _Remus was going to Hogwarts._

Every time he thought about it a little smile jumped to Remus's face. He didn't think he had ever met a man kinder (or older) than Professor Dumbledore, the Hogwarts headmaster. He'd gazed down at Remus from behind his little spectacles with eyes that were far too fiery to be so ice blue, and sworn that he would stand by the founding wishes of Helga Hufflepuff and accept _any_ student who wished to be taught. Remus had adored him at once, a flood of excitement and gratitude washing through him – it was just so exactly what he had always wanted, to the point that he hadn't even been able to speak. (At the same time, he was really hoping he didn't get sorted into Hufflepuff. Mum had been a Ravenclaw and he thought that sounded wicked.)

He stood on his tiptoes, not quite the tallest he could be for a boy of barely-eleven, and tried to peer around the thick racks of men's dress robes and party robes that surrounded him, searching for the best way to go. He was sure Dad had been here just a moment ago, chuckling to himself about the funny sorts of spangled fabrics that wizards would get away with wearing, but now there was no one else to be seen from where Remus stood. He tried straining his ears to listen instead, and caught only the high shrill voice of a woman he didn't know, and the noise of people outside the storefront. Where were Mum and Dad? Where was Madam Malkin?

The last person he was expecting to see was not Mum, or Dad, or the shop-owner or even one of her assistants, but a gangly black-haired boy running full-tilt in his direction who – oof, _yes_ – was most likely not going to stop before realizing Remus was there. They had both hit the ground before Remus could even get a good look at him, and then he was hissing "Don't let her find us!" as loud as you could get and still be whispering, and dragging Remus through the folds of dress robes into the center of the round rack, a space barely big enough for one boy of barely-eleven and definitely not big enough for two. They sat crumpled in on each other – quite too close for Remus's comfort with someone he didn't at all know – and panted for breath, and then the boy spoke again. "Oh, she's just _awful_."

"W-who is?" said Remus, nervous as always when talking to someone new, and still not quite sure what to make of this whirlwind boy.

"_Mother_," he said venomously, a scowl stuck to his face. "It's like this every shop we go to. She has to chew out the shop-owner, get everything her way, have everything be perfect. I just want to get some robes so I can go to school."

Oh, there, at least he'd mentioned something Remus could talk about. "Are you to start at Hogwarts as well?"

"Yes!" cried the boy. "Just a few more short months of summer and I can get out of my bloody house and away from her and my stupid snot-nosed brother."

He was making Remus uncomfortable, even more so than he already was. Remus loved his mum, and his most-likely-a-Muggle little sister, and couldn't imagine being so happy to leave them behind. It was actually one of the only things about going to Hogwarts that he foresaw himself ever being upset about. To see someone, even a total stranger like this pale-skinned knees-and-elbows boy in front of him, become so totally upset about it...

"Hogwarts is going to be wicked," Remus said, at a loss for better words.

"Of course it is," the other boy said. "It can't be worse than this."

"_Sirius Orion Cepheus Black_!" barked a voice, and Remus recognized it as the shrill, piercing woman from before.

"Oh, there she goes, and it'll be too late now, she'll have cast _Sanguinopti_ so she can see anyone related to her in the area without having to – "

A black-gloved hand burst through the folds of the robes surrounding them and clamped like a vise onto the boy – _S__irius_'s upper arm. He was yanked roughly to the outside, and immediately the woman started in on him.

"What in Salazar's name were you thinking? I have had it up to _here_ with your disrespect and disobedience! Gallivanting about in a shop like this – associating with total strangers, _half-bloods_ – "

"Mother – "

"We're _leaving_! Obviously I can't take you anywhere, clearly in a second-rate shop like this the temptation is too great for you to run about like a _child_, do you understand what you represent now, boy? Do you understand that _every eye is on you_?"

"Yours sure didn't seem to be – "

_Whap!_

Remus had crawled out of the clothes rack just in time to see the woman – tall, stately, cruel-featured, but who looked enough like Sirius that it could only be his mum – strike Sirius across the face with her black-gloved hand. Only after it had passed (for Remus had flinched when it happened, squeezed his eyes shut) and a thick welt was already sprouting up across Sirius's right cheekbone did Remus notice that the woman also wore a bulbous black-and-silver ring. Remus knew they had to have seen him there, shocked, terrified, but she didn't even look at him. It was like she _couldn't_ even look at him.

They didn't speak again. The woman wrapped her clawlike hand back around Sirius's arm and began to march him from Madam Malkin's, her long legs carrying them away at a rate that Sirius's couldn't quite keep up with comfortably. Sirius, to his credit, did not cry – Remus surely would have if his mum had done something so horrible, especially in a public shop. He just gazed dismally back at Remus, desperate, almost like he was _sorry_ – and with, Remus noticed suddenly, the same sort of out-of-place fire blazing behind his ice-blue eyes that Albus Dumbledore had had.

"RJ!" his father's voice rang out, some place off to his right. "There you are, thank goodness!" But Remus couldn't turn and look at him, never mind how excited he was to not be lost in this huge shop any more. His eyes were glued to the place where Sirius Black had vanished from view.

This is how they met.

xxx

"I said _give it back, damnit!_"

Remus tore down the passageway, but Sirius always seemed to be just those infuriating three or four steps ahead of him. It didn't help that Sirius was sure-footed where Remus was clumsy, buckling here and there on the earthy floor of the secret tunnel, roots and uneven clods of dirt taking Sirius's side in the whole situation. It also didn't help that Remus had been shouting, because he was already out of breath. By the time he had finally stumbled into the Shack – the place he had managed to corner Sirius, Merlin only knew why, after their whole miserable chase – Remus was still on the bottom floor where the passage let out and Sirius had already clambered up the stairs and was gloating down at him from over the landing railing.

"Give this _back_?" Sirius said, holding the battered leather-bound notebook gingerly in one hand over Remus's head, like a carrot to be dangled. "But I'm not done with it!"

"I'm not," panted Remus, "a bloody library!"

"Hmm, could've fooled me." Sirius took the notebook in both hands now, peeling back the crinkling pages near the beginning to get to the fresher ones about mid-way. He was so _close_, but Remus couldn't even manage to stand straight, he was already hunched over bracing his sweating palms on his knees. "Sorry," Sirius added, "lost my place. Here it is.

"'_You dim the stars when you shine;  
it's a glint and fire off your skin  
that isn't anyone's but mine – '"_

"_Stop_," Remus gasped out. "_Please_."

"'_It melts the very bones of my spine,  
the white-hot ferocity of your grin,  
dimming the stars when you shine_

and my internal galaxies realign,  
thick inescapable gravity from within' – hangon, it's starting to all sound the same here – "

"It's a villanelle," said Remus, finally able to crane upward off his knees and look Sirius in the eye. "There's a pattern to it..."

But Sirius had stopped paying attention to him. His eyes were focused more on the page of Remus's notebook again, but this time both his gaze and his thin, spidery hands around the thin pages held a strange sort of entranced reverence, and Remus knew that Sirius was reading the rest of the poem. The one that went on to use phrases like _irreversibly supine_ and _supernova sin_, the one that Remus had penned almost start-to-finish in the middle of the night a week or so ago after jolting awake from a dream because he was coming in his pajamas. The one that was about Sirius.

"Oh fuck, Moony," Sirius whispered. "I take it back. You're not a library."

Remus saw his opening, and tried not to give it away too soon. "Speaking of _taking things back!_"

He shot up the stairs, making up in force what he lacked in coordination, and dove upon Sirius. Sirius slammed the notebook shut and tried to clutch it close to his chest, but Remus had his wrist in a firm grip, and they grappled up against the railing, rolling each other into it, crashing hips to hips. Soon Remus was out of breath again, and when he finally managed to snatch his notebook away from Sirius's grasp, he did it with such force that it flew across the Shack and banged into a spindly old chair, blowing out a couple of the thin posts across its back. The destruction made only a small noise, but in that tight frozen second between the two of them, winded bodies tense against one another, the sound was nearly deafening.

Suddenly, Remus really just wanted to smash the fuck out of everything.

They tore across the top floor of the Shack, starting with the rest of the chair and working their way back. Sirius heaved a couple of old packing crates all the way down to the first floor, where they dashed to pieces. Remus ripped some of the last shreds of the wallpaper down from the slanted upstairs ceiling-walls. With the two of them working together, they crashed a huge wardrobe over, its doors flying one way and its legs the other, downright _destroyed_. Remus, the wolf always inside of him, could practically smell the adrenaline.

"Fuck, I've got about eighty million splinters," Sirius griped, picking at one that was dangerously close to his fingernail. His chest was heaving for breath again, shoulders rocking out and in with a motion that all but hypnotized Remus.

"Yeah," he said, amazed he was able to even speak steadily. "Good thing there's nothing left up here to smash up any more, right?"

"No," said Sirius. "No, you're dead wrong."

He grabbed Remus by the shoulders and slammed him into the wall, the patch with the least dust, where the wardrobe had been just moments before. It was so furiously perfectly what Remus had wanted that he heard his own voice crackling out the single word _please_ before Sirius's mouth crushed over his, tongue diving inside with no hesitation at all. He canted his hip hard into Remus's own, pinning him even harder into the wall with the grind of bone-on-bone, and Remus could barely breathe. With his last mouthful of air he moaned, deep and needy, and clutched Sirius to him even harder.

They were trying to take it slow.

They'd only been together for three weeks.

They hadn't even told James and Peter yet.

_Fuck that._

Remus needed almost painfully to touch Sirius's skin. The throb of their clothed erections pounding into one another against the Shrieking Shack wall was destroying his blood somehow, making it boil to unbearable hotness and yet somehow freeze absolutely solid at the same time, like all of him was made of some stiff tense spasming metal that couldn't possibly bend enough to get as much of Sirius as he needed. Like absolutely _all_ of him was hard for Sirius, insistent shoving lips and tongue against Sirius's thick wet mouth, fisted hands trying to burrow deeper and clench tighter in his shirt and skin, aching cock pistoning forward insatiably, over and over again, harder and harder. He wouldn't be satisfied till Sirius was crying out with every thrust.

"Merlin – fuck – _R__emus_," hissed Sirius, and _he_ at least found the sense within him to tug and unzip and get them in full-on contact at last, hot rolling skin, wet and ready pricks sliding and snagging against one another. Remus didn't even need to look down at it to feel out that Sirius was impressively larger than he'd imagined, and whatever gear was cranking within him tightened his wired-up veins another notch. He wanted all of it, _hard_. He foresaw bruises and probably more poems.

Something in his face must have given him away. "Yeah, was hoping you'd like that," Sirius hissed in his ear, tonguing at it almost too deep, pulling Remus's shoulders taut. "Was hoping you'd want it this bad. And you do want it this bad, _don't_ you?"

Remus, shuddering, licked a broad stripe up the side of Sirius's neck, and did a little ear-growling of his own.

"I want it _worse_."

Sirius groaned thinly in the back of his throat, bit down hard onto the juncture of Remus's neck and shoulder, and slicked his hand over their cocks, stroking them together in perfect tandem, gathering the fluid there, speed delectably rough. When he had about as much as he was going to get he reached back even further, and swiped his thumb across the pucker of Remus's entrance, coaxing it open but certainly not being gentle about it. Remus rocked hard into the wall. It was too much, _too much_, and thank Merlin Sirius wasn't spending too much time on it, because how would he be expected to handle the rest?

Then Sirius lined them up and thrust into him, and Remus was afraid for a second that he would _break_, because his limbs felt brittle as glass. As Sirius pounded harsh and hot and huge into him, all he could do was clutch viselike across Sirius's back and _scream_. Every lunge was like an earthquake, rippling down through Remus on a million fault lines, slamming him arhythmically into the wall of the Shack with sharp, beautiful pain. Sirius's prick stroked up and down inside of Remus, coursing over his most intimate nerves, and that hurt beautifully, too. Nothing in his entire life had ever felt this exquisite. _Ever_.

"So – loud," Sirius teased.

"You're so _hot_!" Remus screamed. "Fuck. Deeper. _Deeper_. It's like I can't possibly get you close enough – "

But both of them must have been pretty close, because Sirius's orgasm downright _rattled_ through him, and as he was coming deep within Remus, the twisted-up wires holding Remus together finally snapped and he came as well, more violently than he ever had before, still shouting, still clinging Sirius as near to him as he would get.

They collapsed onto the Shack floor, just as broken as the rest of everything. When they finally managed to get up to leave Remus almost didn't even remember to get his notebook.

It's their first time.

xxx

"Schedules!" James demanded soundly, and from the depths of their bags each of the four of them withdrew crisp, decidedly McGonagallian leaves of parchment, to trade around and compare.

"You're _still_ on with Divination, Pete?" Sirius groaned, rolling his eyes. "Even after last year?"

"It's an easy O, if you know how to lie," Peter insisted. "Can't help it if I'm better at making crap up than you."

"Speaking of lies, you just told one," said Sirius, glaring. "Moony's got the right idea, Arithmancy and Ancient Runes. Practicality."

"Not Care of Magical Creatures, Remus?" said James.

"I figure I've got a handle on that one already," Remus said. "Been doing a pretty good job of it for the past seven years..."

Sirius chucked him in the shoulder, right where the gnarled sickle-shaped scar from his bite was, and made an odd face, like he couldn't decide if it was okay to laugh at the joke or not. Peter didn't get it until several beats later, by which point they had all already begun to eat their breakfasts.

"Sullooksike poim prhenk pleyying time," James said, then swallowed, "is here, here, or here. Especially Tuesdays."

"Look at us, having to schedule time to plan pranks," Sirius lamented, gesturing melodramatically with a forkful of bacon. "What happened to spur-of-the-moment craftsmanship? What happened to artistic genius?"

"Slughorn happened," said Remus into his juice. The last term of their third year had seen them all with the worst detentions yet, courtesy of the Head of House of the people who were most frequently their victims.

"Ugh, don't re_mind_ me, Moony," James whined. "That great walrus wouldn't know artistic genius if it bit him on his oversized arse."

"Oi, don't get on about Slughorn's arse, I'm _eating_," said Peter.

"Yes, Merlin forbid anything come between Petey and his brekky," said Sirius. Peter was just about to bite back with a nasty retort - from the look on his face, anyway, his mouth was still jammed full of egg – when the arrival of the owl post cut them off, and in swooped dozens of the great birds, raining down especially onto the first-years, toting large care packages from overzealous parents.

Two hefty brown owls flew straight over the Gryffindor table and deposited a big package in front of a fourth-year, too, and that fourth-year was Sirius Black.

"What in the world have you got already on the first day?" said Remus, eyeing it curiously. Remus knew books, and this package looked suspiciously like a book. Slowly – almost..._nervously?_ – Sirius untaped and unfolded the wrapping to reveal a glossy yellow tome with dark red letters printed into the front: _Specialized Transfiguration IV_.

"Oi, wait – " said James.

"Izzat - ?" said Peter.

Sirius nodded, far from subtle, and then stowed the book-package down into his bag and continued on eating his breakfast as if it had never happened.

"Sirius," Remus finally said, since clearly none of the rest of them were going to talk about it, "why have you got a giant book on specialized Transfiguration?"

Sirius rolled his eyes. "_Moony_," he mimicked, "it's _obviously_ a secret, so what makes you think I would actually tell you?"

_That bit where Marauders don't keep secrets from each other any more,_ Remus thought to himself, scowling at his toast. _Not after my big hairy one._

But Sirius remained completely silent on the subject all day. They sat in double Charms with the Hufflepuffs and as Flitwick tottered on about the planned course material for the year, Remus worried his bottom lip between his teeth and passed Sirius notes, little balls of paper that rolled across the desk and unfolded on their own (the rationale being that if Flitwick caught them passing notes, he'd be impressed enough at the means by which they were doing it that he wouldn't care so much that they were doing it in the first place).

_What's in the book?_ he wrote, and even reduced himself to drawing frustrated little faces.

**Nothing** wrote Sirius. **I'm telling you.**

_I hate secrets_ wrote Remus.

Sirius drew an excited smiling face, complete with his hair, which this term was longer than ever, nearly to his shoulders. **You're going to love this one!**

In Arithmancy the second day, which Remus was taking without the three of them, all he did was scowl.

By the end of the week Slughorn assigned them a foot and a half on ways in which potions had a practical real-world application to their lives over the summer, and with the Gryffindor common room was too much abuzz with back-to-school fraternizing to be tolerated Remus made plans to hole up in the library. No sooner did he walk through the library doors than he saw the three of them, the last place he would ever expect them to be without _him_ along, huddled over that stupid yellow book. He tried to tiptoe closer but Peter, like usual, ruined everything.

"Shut it!" he hissed, just barely quiet enough to avoid attracting Madam Pince's attention. And Sirius did shut it, with an equally loud _snap!_, and stuffed it back into his schoolbag, same as always. Remus took the few short steps toward him and fixed him with a glare.

"Damnit, Sirius – "

"Look, I never meant it to happen this way," Sirius said, taking Remus's arm and sort of steering them away from the other two. "This whole thing was James's idea, and I think it's brilliant, but part of it is that _you mustn't know_." He made a grand little wave of his fingers. "I promise it will all be made clear to you in time."

Remus frowned - he was not in the mood for Sirius's theatrics. "Well the bloody clock is ticking," he said.

"Chin up, Remus, we're already getting the hang of it."

"The hang of _what_ – "

Oh.

Sirius had been bending in, presumably to peck Remus on the cheek, as he often did when he was feeling particularly apologetic, despite the numerous times Remus had expressed annoyance at such an invasive quirk. But Remus had turned in exactly the right – or exactly the _wrong_ moment, and their lips, it appeared, had slipped together instead. And far from Remus's usual annoyance, doing it this way was rather..._nice_.

Sirius had apparently noticed it too, and lingered there, just a moment, sort of sliding his mouth over Remus's, soft, and just kind of lovely. Then just as suddenly as it had happened, Sirius seemed to realize what he was actually doing, and jerked away, honey-brown eyes wide in startlement, lips still a bit slack.

"Ch...chin up," he repeated, flabbergasted, and then vanished back to James and Peter.

Remus lifted his fingertips to his mouth in bewilderment, and didn't quite make it all the way there, his hand sort of hovering in the vicinity of his chin.

This is how they had their first kiss.

xxx

He finished drying the last of the glasses, and set it gently back into the cupboard, careful not to clink it too hard against any of the others. When he was done he turned to find his mother smiling at him. She'd been doing an awful lot of that lately. He made a face back at her as if to say, _what now?_

"Oh, I remember when you couldn't even reach that cupboard," she said, and her mouth quivered a little.

"Mum – "

"Well I do!" she said. "I can't believe you ever shot up as tall as you did, you've got more of your father in you after all." She stumbled over mentioning his father, and once again Remus was worried about her, out here alone in this house, him an only child and his father dead nearly a year...

"Look, Mum, it's not like I'm going to grow up and leave for good," he said, for what felt like the hundredth time.

"You're seventeen, Remus, and there's a war on – there _is_," she said, when his face fell a little. "You're already grown up." She pulled a smile back onto her face, though, and crossed the tiny kitchen to hug him close. "Just don't forget about your old Ravenclaw mum when you're out there being a strapping Gryffindor hero, now, you hear?"

"Mum, you're not old, and I'm not _strapping_," said Remus into her wheat-brown hair. "At least let me finish Hogwarts before we start doing this."

"You're right, you're right," she said. "Go back to your poor friend, before you end up taking too much flack about helping your mummy with the washing up."

Remus smiled back at her, this time.

He climbed the stairs up to his room, eager to see Sirius again – having him around for a week or so in the summer was the best idea he could have had. But when he got there Sirius was nowhere to be found. Remus checked the bathroom, then his mum's room and the little study upstairs, but Sirius wasn't in any of those places either, and finally he found him by looking out the window, into the yellow-dark setting sunlight of their abnormally scorching summer, where Sirius was sitting rocking halfheartedly in the little rope-and-plank swing that Remus had used as a child.

"There you are," he said softly, as he arrived at Sirius's elbow. All of Sirius seemed to be sort of glowing in the hot, bright dusk, the light glinting fiery gold on his dark hair and smooth, warm white on his pale skin. He was beautiful. Remus had never quite understood how he got to have something so beautiful.

"Sorry," said Sirius, "I got a bit restless. How many dishes did you have to wash, anyway? There were only three of us."

"Mum is thorough," Remus said, and chuckled. He moved around to stand behind Sirius and began pushing him on the swing, thrilling in the way he could press his hands full flush against the hard warmth of Sirius's back, how he would fly away and always rock back to him every time.

"I like your mum," Sirius said after a minute. The implied _she's much better than my mum_ didn't need to be said.

"Yeah," said Remus.

"She's a lot like you, I think."

"Really?"

"Sure."

They were talking without really saying anything. Remus and Sirius did this a lot lately; it was less about the words and more about listening to each other's voices, taking comfort in each other's presence. Six months, they'd been together. And yet if Remus thought about it, it was so much more than that, really. They'd been friends, of course, since first year, but even further – Remus felt almost as if he'd known Sirius his entire life.

At the top of one particularly high, hard swing, Sirius leapt off. He arced through the air and landed perfectly on his feet, more like a cat than the dog he identified so clearly with now, and turned to grin at Remus. But Remus was still sort of staring at the swing, which had come back to him empty.

Sirius hadn't swung back to him.

His mum had said, _there's a war on._

"I love you," Remus blurted, into the hazy golden-brown sunlight of the evening.

Sirius fixed him with a curious gaze, hazel eyes locked on hazel eyes, then crossed slowly to him, backing him into the thick rough trunk of the tree the swing was tied to. He curved his broad, thick, Quidditch-playing hands sort of around Remus's ribs, and kissed him, lush, smooth, dark and beautiful. His mum was probably watching out the window and she was seeing this. But some cicada hummed somewhere, a crow cawed its discontent into the August air, a faint breeze rustled through the leaves of the tree above him, and everything felt absolutely right. These three words had solidified and changed something between them, changed everything, for the better. With this honey-dense feeling bubbling up inside of Remus, from the pit of his stomach to the swell of his heart, maybe he could be some _strapping Gryffindor hero_ after all. He felt in that moment like he could do anything.

"I love you," said Sirius, when he was done.

And Remus said, "I know."

Even though they had never said it before.

xxx

Remus sat alone in the compartment at the far back end of the train. Out in the aisles of the train proper he could hear all sorts of happy sounds, people milling back to one another after spending all summer apart. Older people. People that would most likely want nothing to do with a small brown werewolf boy who didn't know the first thing about actually doing magic. Besides, back here at the back of the train, everything smelled a bit funny, because that was where the little lavatories were. It was why no one was sitting with him yet, and probably wouldn't the whole way there.

Instead, he picked back up the book he had been reading, probably one of the biggest books he'd ever tried to read, called _Hogwarts, A History_. His mum had told him it was full of absolutely everything about the castle, and that he could use it to look up anything he wanted to know, but Remus wanted to know _everything_, so he'd sworn to read it from cover to cover. He knew that Hogwarts had once housed a live dragon in its lowest dungeons, a Hebridean Black from a runt egg that had never grown to full size, just a couple of generations after the years of the four founders. He learned all about Apparition, and just how and where and when you could and couldn't do it in relation to the great castle. He read about the ghosts, and the common rooms, and how huge parts of the castle had crumbled and had to be rebuilt in 1934, since it was beyond the castle's capacity to heal itself, and he was just going to read more and more and more when Remus realized that the gossipy bustling outside his door had risen in volume again, and that it was dark, outside his window, and that they were probably almost there.

Quickly, he changed into his sweeping black robes, and it was then that he finally began to start getting a little thrill. Oh, he was actually _doing_ this. He was going to Hogwarts, to become a proper wizard. And he made a promise to himself that he would do it absolutely right, and he wouldn't cry about any of it any more, because they were letting him go after all.

The train finally glided to a halt and everyone began milling off. Remus slipped his huge book into the depths of his robes, where it weighed him down a bit unevenly, and squashed his hat onto his head as he struggled out into Hogsmeade Station.

"Firs' years! All yeh firs' years, this way!" Remus followed the sound of the booming voice until he could identify its owner, a mind-bogglingly large man with a wild, thick black beard that had a broad smile inside of it. "Boats're this way, c'mon now!"

Remus followed the huge man, whose name he learned was Hagrid, over to the boats he spoke of, and plunked into one, rocking it a little. Across from him sat a round, watery-eyed blond boy who was still munching on sweets from the trolley on the train, and a small freckly ginger girl with big bright-green eyes.

"Awfully heavy on your end for a boy like you," she murmured. "What's that about?"

"I've...got a big book," said Remus, biting his lip a bit. They were _talking_ to him.

"Must be some book!" said the blond boy, spraying little bits of Cauldron Cake out into the water of the lake around them as they coasted toward the castle. It did nothing to mar the view. Hogwarts, lit up at night with hundreds of warm little yellow lights, was truly a sight out of Remus's dreams.

The boy was called Peter Pettigrew and the girl Lily Evans. Remus learned this when the severe-looking Professor McGonagall lined them up inside to get sorted.

By the Sorting Hat.

At Hogwarts.

Remus still couldn't quite believe it.

He watched, rapt, as every first-year ahead of him sat on the stool and put the hat on his or her head and got whisked away to a table. On the first little girl up it rested there for ages, and Remus started to get nervous, because what if it took that long for him? What if they _all_ began to take that long, and he would just have to stand here and wait for hours, before he would ever know? But eventually Alice Adelarde shuffled off to Hufflepuff, and then came Joseph Barclay, and then came Sirius Black.

A sort of rustling whisper came from the Slytherin table when Sirius sat down on the stool in the front, and Remus could tell: they all knew he was going there. Some families just stuck in certain houses, he'd read about it in his book. After a deliberation of only a few seconds, the rip in the hat opened up and declared it quite solidly:

"Gryffindor!"

Zachary Aaron had also gone to Gryffindor, and the whole table had erupted into raucous cheers, much louder than Hufflepuff had for Alice or Ravenclaw for Joseph. But when Sirius Black stepped down from the front, and strode over to the table underneath the red and gold lion banner, it seemed huge parts of the room had been shocked into silence.

Professor McGonagall shook herself, and then announced "Burnhurst, Alexander!" He went to Hufflepuff, and they shouted out their excitement for him, and things mostly went back to normal.

Reginald Clawson was a Slytherin. So was his twin sister, Rita. Charybda Crock was the first new Ravenclaw girl. And then came Arielle DeWitt, after a moment or two on the hat's part, to Gryffindor.

"_Yeah, Gryffindor!_" screamed Sirius Black – so loud he could be heard even over the rest of the catcalling of his new house. He continued cheering until everyone else at the Gryffindor table had already stopped. Remus peered over at him, and saw his face fixed in a mask of determination and fierce glee – almost as if he were happy and furious at the same time. _He hates someone in this room,_ Remus realized. _He's happy that they're upset._ For the room had rustled again: something strange was going on.

It happened every time. He did it for little ginger Lily Evans; he did it for Gloria Glenning, and Lars Johnson, and for Frank Longbottom, who was only two ahead of Remus in the slowly depleting alphabet. When it was finally Remus's turn to approach the stool, he found himself suddenly realizing that all of his own personal nervousness about the process was gone, so perplexed was he by the behaviors of Sirius Black.

_Oh,_ said the hat to Remus, when it was on his head. _A __**werewolf**__, are you? A wisp of a thing like you?_

Remus panicked. _Don't tell, don't tell anyone, please oh please you're just a hat –_

Exactly, it told him. _Just a hat. Who am I going to tell?_ Remus wrung his hands together in his lap. He wished it would just put him in Ravenclaw already and be done with it. _Ravenclaw?_ it mused. _Oh, you've got a thick streak of it in you, no doubt about it. But a __**werewolf**__...and at so young an age, and to have borne that in you for so long – what strength, you poor boy. What outrageous courage._

"Gryffindor!" it announced for the whole of the Great Hall to hear, and Remus, a bit startled by its analysis, nevertheless rose and crossed meekly to his new house table.

"_Yes!_ Another one!" screamed Sirius Black, looking straight down at him from where he had stood out of excitement. With the way he stared, Remus couldn't help but stare back, at this pale, pale boy, with his thick wispy dark hair, and the deepest pits of cloud-grey eyes he had ever seen.

Yes, there was something strange about this boy. And Remus – realizing suddenly that as a fellow first-year Gryffindor boy, he'd be going to class and eating and living and _sleeping_ with this strange boy – decided in that moment that he liked it.

When the hat deemed Marlene McKinnon a Gryffindor in about two seconds flat, Remus leapt to his feet and cheered for her just as loud as Sirius did. Across the table they sort of glanced at each other, and Sirius flashed Remus a crooked, face-splitting smile – not the fierce sort of angry-happy smile he'd been blasting at all the new Gryffindors, but a real one, one that made Remus's face light up rather the same.

The first time, then, that Sirius smiled at him.

xxx

Remus has ended up under his desk again. This is another night without sleep, another night where he will be mysteriously absent from his classes the following day, which is today now, a thin yellow sun beginning to show its face on the horizon, the moon already ousted from the sky. The moon must be gone because Remus is alive again. He emerges to the world and unfurls his limbs as best he can but they are stiff with it, the grisly not-arthritis hardening all but his heart, which is soft as ever. He has spent all night, once again, not sleeping, but dreaming.

There's a slim mirror in the top drawer of his desk and he takes it out and eyes himself in it, checking for damage. Snape's potion is brewed true, though, and the only scars from the night before will be the irreversible dark bags that circle underneath Remus's eyes. He will take those. As he sets the mirror back in its place the rustle of parchment catches his ear and he turns for it, and it's the map, the _map._ The last place he saw Sirius.

He knows after this night that he cannot make Sirius awful. He cannot if he tries, or else he cannot try, because Remus is and always has been in love. Every wretched full-moon night like this where the thoughts have spun maddening paths in his head is because he is and has always been in love, and he is and has always been so stupid, so impossibly weak for never telling him. Remus would tell even awful Sirius Black, even escaped prisoner accused murderer supposed traitor Sirius Black, because weak stupid Remus is still in love. But how can he not be? When the blood-red potion twists up his resistance to channel full-on against his insides' raging beast, what does he do to keep the flood of fancy at bay?

They are all dreams, of course. Remus and Sirius met on the train – who would ever catch Walburga Black in a perfectly nice but perfectly _common_ shop such as Madam Malkin's? And Sirius has never been to Remus's childhood home, but he said _I love you_ dozens of times, to all of the Marauders, throwing it about casually on those he is close to, never with the seriousness of Remus's heart because Remus is _not_ a strapping Gryffindor hero, he is an immense coward, and Sirius doesn't know. Sirius has never known, has never kissed him, has never fucked him raw in the Shrieking Shack as Remus has so often imagined on pitch-black moonless nights, rocking himself to climax in his own twisted bedlinens, _imagining_, just like he has imagined this tonight (last night, he remembers, it is morning now). The only piece of it with any truth is the Great Hall, Remus's Sorting, Sirius's blind fury at the house that Remus later learned had destroyed his brother and driven his cousin mad. Any other vision Remus dreams up has shifted and changed, because it has been so long he has lost Sirius's hands, lost the color of Sirius's eyes, but he will never lose that moment, that smile, that intensity, that absolute conundrum that is the first Gryffindor Black and the first shining star that rose in Remus's moon-swallowed sky.

(The villanelle, he concedes, may also be real.)

With a groan Remus realizes how much he longs for a bed, and he drags himself away from his desk intending to fall through the conjoining door to his room. But he realizes, too, that the Marauders' Map is still in his hand, is still _open_, never mischief-managed shut from some desperate longing he had to see him again. He looks at it, Marauderly curious, and of course does not see him.

What he sees is Peter Pettigrew.

It's as if the moon is upon him again, so hard does his blood begin to race. Convinced his eyes are lying (_the map never lies_) he rushes to the window, eager to see it in a stronger light, but it is there, it has always been there, he realizes, the footprints that mark him unusually small, the place he has been found unusually familiar, and Remus _knows_, he knows he knows he knows, and how could Peter be so stupid, how could Pettigrew be so weak, how could Wormtail be so heartless.

How could Sirius be so _right_.

Remus will never sleep now. All of his exhaustion from the dreaming sleepless night before has left him, because he knows he knows he _knows_, and Sirius must know too, which means Sirius is three or four steps ahead of him like always, Sirius has fire blazing behind his icy eyes, Sirius is keeping a secret, Sirius has flown away from him but is coming rocking back. It means Remus still has a chance to stop being stupid weak Remus and become Gryffindor hero Remus, to save Sirius to save himself, and tell him absolutely everything he has imagined over these countless nights they have been apart, everything in his soft-as-ever heart. It means his dreams are coming true.

The dawning sunlight, outside the window, perhaps isn't as thin as Remus thought.


End file.
